Fall NEARC 2024

As the frequency of natural and human-caused disasters increases, there is a greater need for efficient coordination amongst emergency responders, resource managers, and the public. GIS is often touted as an invaluable and underutilized tool for public safety teams. But what does mapping in near real-time entail, and is this feasible for a small municipality? This presentation will explore how the Town of Concord, MA recently embarked on answering this question using ArcGIS Online’s suite of tools.

In March 2024, the Town’s GIS team was asked to facilitate a tabletop exercise, in coordination with several other Town departments, the Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency (MEMA), and students from Massachusetts Maritime Academy’s Emergency Management program. We created a web application to edit and visualize near real-time updates of an excessive rainfall/flooding event in a simulated Emergency Operations Center (EOC).

In this presentation, we will demonstrate our final application and operations workflow, which took inspiration from the Emergency Management Operations ArcGIS Solution. We will also share our thought process for selection of appropriate tools, how we customized a solution within a limited scope and timeframe, and how we integrated data collection, maps, dashboards, and live data feeds, using Experience Builder. Finally, we will share our ideas for ways to expand and improve upon this application in the future.

The use of technology is a controversial issue in many communities, and there is a growing disparity between those who want to share and those who want to maintain privacy in this fast-moving world of information. This is true globally, as we see places that we enjoy being “overloved” with activity once they are public, and conversely that communities are being underrepresented because they fear putting their “place” on a map. Using examples from mapping and engagement methods used with the indigenous Micronesian communities of the Ulithi atoll, in the Yap Outer Islands of the Federated States of Micronesia, this talk will discuss the benefits of starting an early community engagement strategy, considerations of information gathering, and the steps used to train non-users in science and technology from a modern western perspective. There are many sub-categories of learning associated with this topic, including ethics in GIS, how to capture data using offline FieldMaps technology, increasing buy-in to the planning process with enhanced transparency, and improving the results of the information-gathering process to create a more comprehensive, thorough and thoughtful GIS.

School districts often require spatial modeling for enrollment forecasting, program analysis, or school boundary changes. Providing accurate data for school districts for long and short-term curriculum and facilities planning can make a world of difference for students, enabling them to have access to a more equitable and robust education. ArcGIS spatial tools can be used in tandem with Alteryx modeling software to create custom workflows that provide data-supported answers to school district questions. Alteryx is a powerful data analytics software with spatial capabilities that allows for rapid and easily customizable model building (no coding required), while spatial data preparation, investigation, editing, and mapping are all performed within ArcGIS. This session will show several examples of how ArcGIS and Alteryx can be used together to improve workflows and perform complex data modeling and will dive into our Enrollment Modeling Application and special programs accessibility analysis. While the session focuses on school district analyses as an example, the integration of ArcGIS and Alteryx for spatial data modeling is widely applicable to a variety of topics.